06.27.09
Chelsea Culp and Ben Foch
07.18.09
Terence Hannum
Irena Knezevic
08.22.09
Joe Grimm and Ben Russell
09.19..09
Lane Relyea curates
JOE GRIMM : The World of Things In Themselves
Joe Grimm's current projector work negotiates the space between the physically real and the perceptually real; between noumena and phenomena. Modified 16mm projectors produce flicker rates with speeds that vary in complex curves over time, producing complex visual interrelationships governed by chance-based algorithms. Photosensitive circuitry translates these light waves into sound waves, sonifying flickers that are sometimes slow enough to be visible to the eye -- and sometimes fast enough to be perceived only by the ear. Grimm will create a monolithic light/noise installation that goes literally to the limits of the senses and beyond them, provoking a confrontation with that ultimate unattainable reality: The World of Things In Themselves.
About the artist: Joe Grimm is a sound/performance artist based in Chicago, IL. Drawing inspiration from 60’s composers such as Alvin Lucier, Terry Riley, and Charlemagne Palestine, Grimm makes works that reveals acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena. His performances frequently take the form of meditations: resonance, repetition, friction, and disintegration become the hypnotic focal points in an attempt to reach a state of inner tranquility, balance, and heightened attention to sonic minutiae. Grimm has collaborated live or on record with artists such as Lucky Dragons, Greg Davis, Glenn Branca, Alvin Lucier, Dirty Projectors, The One A.M. Radio, Black Forest/Black Sea, Geoff Mullen, Lightning Bolt, and Pleasurehorse.
BEN RUSSELL : AN INCANTATION FOR ETERNITY (2009, 16mm projectors, 16mm film loops, prisms, mirrors, electronics)
A makeshift CONE OF LIGHT. Five 16mm projectors in a ring on the base, canted upwards, five film loops (239 frames black. 1 frame clear) racketing through their gears. That din alone is a wall, softened by the second ring of rainbow cables and homemade pedals: a floor of sound, raised off the floor. The third ring, a circle of speakers. Inputs lead to speaker outputs, feedback loops building a complex of rhythms from the single pop and scratch that each projector emits, 1 second delayed from each burst of light. Each projector burst, 10 seconds apart, bouncing off a mirror on the adjacent wall, reflected back through a prism hovering at the tip of the cone. CONE OF LIGHT as counterpoint to WALL OF SOUND. Single-frame rainbow for a shuttered space. Oh! and when they meet up, when those five projector loops all coincide through some trick of time (nothing moves as quickly as everything else, after all), a rainbow pentagram is quick-sketched in the air above: AN INCANTATION FOR ETERNITY
About the artist: Ben Russell is an itinerant curator and media artist whose works have screened in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East India Trading Co. buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and solo screenings at the Rotterdam Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art. A 2008 Guggenheim award recipient, Ben began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, and he currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
